The Chill of Soft and Cold
by angel-dawes
Summary: A lot has changed since Annie wrote "Get Out" on some entryway wallpaper. Spoilers for 3x08.


Sometimes after really intense episodes of shows, or after seeing mindblowing films, I get in this state where I can't stop thinking about something until I write about it. Usually that just means opening a word document and typing out my thoughts, never to be shared with anyone, but after watching last week's _Being Human_ episode I started writing this. There's more to it, enough for a few more chapters, and I may or may not post them if I have the time to clean them up a bit.

Basically, this is just a piece about Annie and how the characters, particularly Mitchell, react to her. It's completely out of chronological order, but I think I've made it fairly clear at the beginning of each section when the scene takes place.

So enjoy, and please review!

* * *

_The Chill of Soft and Cold_

_1.  
_

Vampires can smell werewolves, and they can _certainly _smell humans, but ghosts are different. It's not so much a smell as it is a sense. Maybe it's because there's no smell of blood where the smell of blood should be, or maybe it's just a feeling, the little chill at the back of the spine like the one when you see your front door open just a crack even though you know you locked up on your way out.

That's what Mitchell feels when he sees Annie for the first time. The skin at the nape of his neck seems to tighten and twitch as George squeaks on about police and paint and how that graffiti on the wall downstairs had better wash off. Annie is so excited that they can see her, but it takes Mitchell a few moments before he can do anything but stare and _sense_.

_2._

When Annie asks, "can you see me?" through the static of the television, Mitchell can swear his heart is thudding in his chest even though it's been nearly a century since _that _has happened. He can't feel her through the glass but he tries to touch her anyway, and he tries to imagine that she can feel how sorry he is for everything he didn't do for her. He wants to tear the world apart, but he can't even tear his eyes away after she's faded to static again.

"We're gonna get her back," he says, and he's never meant anything as much as he means _this_.

_3._

"I thought _no one _could see me!" she says on that first day as she pours them both a cup of tea. Mitchell watches George across the table as his furry friend silently understands that Mitchell really _hasn't _been the one leaving those mugs everywhere. "Sorry about trying to scare you off. I really _do _like you guys. That's why I haven't tried to do the whole, you know, haunting thing yet. Usually I flick the lights on and off, throw things about, that sort of thing. You guys seem sweet. It's just, you know, that time of the month. Wanted to be left alone. That, and you left the red paint lying around."

"Yeah, thanks," George grumbles, glaring at the front hallway where 'get out' is still drying on the wallpaper.

"So, um, how come you guys can see me, anyway? Everyone else just looks straight through me. Even Owen, and if _anyone _can see me, it should be him." She pauses, accurately assessing from their blank expressions that they don't know who Owen is. "Your landlord?"

"Oh, right," Mitchell says awkwardly. He can't exactly figure out how to tell this beautiful, naive dead girl about all the stuff she should never have to know. He feels the slight chill as she moves behind him, leans over his shoulder, pours a bit of milk into his tea. She pats his back and waits for an answer. He rolls his shoulders forward to shake the cold.

_4._

Annie doesn't sleep, so she paces instead. Mitchell can sense her moving about the house even if she takes extra care to drift silently from room to room like, well, like a ghost.

Before she finds out about Owen, back when her memory is still hazy and incomplete, he can sense her standing on each stair, starting from the top, testing the weight and trying out different walks. She constantly tries to figure out where she went wrong, and the pipes groan and clank, and George will bitch and moan in the morning while Annie stares absently at the stairs until Mitchell asks her for a cup of tea to snap her out of it and get her smiling again.

_5._

In Barry, the house is bigger, so her route is longer, and Mitchell wonders how many times she's going to lap the place with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company before she realizes what he's done.

He gets out of bed one night (when he can no longer stand the thought of hearing her coming towards his room fast and furious, the pieces of the puzzle _finally _all fitting together in her mind). He creeps to the entry, all his predator instincts honed in on timing and perfecting his attack. He waits, the door just barely ajar. He can hear the soft scrape of her boots on the carpet, and he can feel the shape of her body through the wood and the way it sends pleasant shivers through his spine just to know that she's there. She passes his hiding spot and he flings the door open, grabbing her hips from behind. She shrieks, jumping a mile, but is laughing before her feet hit the ground as she spins around to face him, lit up like the sun.

"Mitchell!" she shouts, punching him in the arm furiously, but her face is red and her cheeks shake with laughter. "God, you scared the _shit_ out of me!"

"I'm sorry," he laughs, but they both know he's not, so she punches him again as he dodges and ducks circles around her.

The door to George and Nina's room creaks open at the bottom of the stairs, and Mitchell has a brief moment to think _please let it be George_, like a child might hope for the more lenient parent, but it's Nina standing there with arms folded over her chest and a look of complete disgust on her face. That just sets Annie off again.

"Sorry!" she says quickly through the peals of infectious laughter that have Mitchell's face red with embarrassing adoration. "Sorry, sorry. Mitchell frightened me, is all. Sorry to wake you."

"You two are bloody _children_," Nina says, but she bites her lip to try and hide the smile as she ducks back into her room. They can hear George grumbling through the walls, and they both start laughing anew as Mitchell pulls her out of the hallway and shuts the door so they don't get yelled at again.

_6._

Nina hates the thought of Mitchell touching Annie, kissing her, stroking her young, dead face with hands he's used to charm and caress and tear women apart for _ages_, for long years of bloodlust and rage.

She watches them in the morning sometimes. Annie will say something clever, and Mitchell will laugh with his eyes sparkling and light. It'll be like he's never hurt anyone at all, and Nina doesn't think he deserves the comfort of the happiness that Annie obviously brings him.

It's only the fact that she believes Annie deserves _every single_ _smile_ that he gives her that keeps Nina from lashing out like a mongoose at a coiled snake every time she sees the pads of Mitchell's fingertips graze across the small of Annie's back.

_7._

George can't sense her the way that Mitchell can. She doesn't keep George up at night. George doesn't lie in silent sympathy, wondering what horrible thing she needs to set right before she can move on. But, unbelievably, it's George who starts off hating her.

"You're dead-ish, aren't you? I mean, you, you, you know ghosts, right? Can't we just hand her off to one of them? I'm sure you know a few lovely ones. We can get her into a good…ghost…home?"

George looks at him imploringly the morning after they meet Annie, as they walk into work, but Mitchell just rolls his eyes.

"We're not just putting her out in the bin like garbage, George. She's one of us. The whole point of this, you know, the whole humanity thing, is _connections _with people. People like Annie. _Normal _people. Well, more normal than us, anyway."

"Right, except...we can't _connect _with her unless we're in the house, because otherwise we look like a couple of nutters talking to someone who isn't there _and_, if you recall, connecting with her _in _the house is apparently going to involve listening to her rant about Aaron for two bloody hours while we sit around and eat pizza and try to watch telly without giving in to the desire to kill ourselves!"

"Owen," Mitchell says pointedly, trying to ignore the way George's voice always gets so ear-splitting at the end of a good rant.

"I don't…Mitchell, I don't _care_. That's the problem. I just don't care. I'm sorry that something bad happened to her, and I'm sorry she's dead, and I'm sorry that we moved into that house which is, by the way, hideous, and if she were gone then we could actually paint it a decent, _normal_ color like white or beige or taupe without listening to her moan about how _Owen _didn't like the color either and how everything we do apparently reminds us of that saint, because the man _must _have been a saint to put up with her constant, never-ending nattering on about..."

"What the hell is taupe?"

"It's a color, Mitchell. And the point! The point is that I really don't think it's going to work out, the three of us living together. I think you should help her move on. Do the whole thing, with the ghosts, and the thing that the ghosts do to do what they need to do. _You_ know."

"I don't know. I've never been friends with a ghost before. Not really. They tend to avoid vampires, the bigots. Annie is…she's different. She's sweet."

Now it's George's turn to roll his eyes.

"She's annoying."

"Yeah, well, so are you, and you don't see _me _trying to find you a pack."

George storms off muttering about racism, and they don't talk about it again.

_8._

George hopes every day that Mitchell never mentions the fact that he used to want Annie gone. The first time he tells Annie that he loves her, he realizes that if he had a time machine, that conversation about the ghosts would be the first thing he'd go back and change, right before changing the whole werewolf thing (but, _oh_, then he never would have met Annie, and the fact that hypothetically reversing his condition becomes a _tough call_ really proves to him how much he _needs _her in his life).

_9._

When Annie hands Mitchell a mug of tea and sits down next to him, pressed against his body soft and cold, he tries not to look at her. Her hair tickles his neck, and he feels the blood pumping in George's veins across the room, and he closes his eyes and holds the tea in his hands and tries not to think about the way Becca looked up at him when she realized that he wasn't going to save her. He tries not to think about the fact that the only thing he wanted to do was lick the blood off every last molecule of her skin as she lay dying in George's arms.

Annie being near him feels nice, and right, because he can feel the comfort she's trying to give without having to resist the smell of her blood. She shifts closer and he sighs, warming up.

"It's all right, Mitchell," she says to him quietly, so quietly that he's not even sure she says it or if he's just wishing she would. Her fingers are wrapped around his shoulder like she's trying to dig into his skin, and he can feel her nails like ice, but the place where her side is pressed against his starts to feel warm. It's like holding a mug of tea in the cold air. _She _is like holding a mug of tea in the cold air. Everything is impossibly shit but for her, and George, and he has to hold on to them if he's going to make it without killing anyone else.

He reaches out and wraps his fingers around hers, and the sad smile she gives him makes him feel like maybe it will all be worth it. He'll worry about Lauren and Herrick and Seth tomorrow.

_10._

He kneels on the ground beside her, cursing her for being so _thick_, cursing her inability to see that this, all this, is so much bigger than the two of them or even the twenty people he and Daisy murdered. He can feel the end coming like a physical presence, and he's filled with the need to get out, to run as far away as he can, but he knows that it will all be meaningless if she looks at him with hatred again like she did back at the house (he hadn't lied when he said he couldn't live without her. He _won't_).

"In twenty minutes," he breathes, agony spreading through his body like a cancer (and the way she said _there was this cancer between us and you let me fall in love with you_ rings in his ears and causes his gut to clench with physical pain not unlike the way he felt when she was ripped from his world) as he looks at her impassive, immobile face. She can't even look at him. His gut rolls and twists. "They're going to move me to a maximum security station, and that's it. Guards and guns. Even you won't be able to get me out."

She looks at him, breath hitching, and he thinks _finally_, before resuming his constant, fervent hoping that she'll understand how important this is to him, to her, to everyone in the entire human race. He grabs her hand, because he needs her to understand, and maybe she'll feel the pain he's in and maybe she'll see.

"Oh, Mitchell," she sighs, whispering softly, touching his face. "I don't know how to make this any clearer to you; I don't want you to get out."

She turns away with his hand still clasped between her own, refusing to look at him once again. But there's a part between "Mitchell" and "I", where her breath comes out in a gasp that the movement of her lips tells him is "my love", and he realizes that even if the world falls apart because of what she's done, he can't ever hate her or even begin to try. She's _his Annie_, and he went to purgatory to save her, and _he _killed those people. Whatever happens, it's on him. Even if all this could have been avoided by her understanding. He'll take the blame when it all burns down. He'd do anything to hear her say she loves him again, even if he knows he'll never deserve it again.

_11._

Sometimes Annie stands outside Mitchell's door and presses her fingertips against the wood and tries to figure out if Mitchell is different from Owen or if it's just history repeating.

_12._

There's something so broken but strong about Annie that even George, with his stubborn ties to his old version of "reality" and "the real world" can't hate her for long. Even when she frustrates him, his anger melts away far more quickly than it does when he's angry with Mitchell. Every time he snaps at her, or judges her, or sighs too loudly and disappoints her, he's quick with an apology later. He's not the best at admitting he's wrong, George, but then again, neither is she. Sometimes they won't talk for a day, but then he'll find her standing sadly near the sink in the kitchen, and they'll hug like nothing happened, except maybe they'll hold on just a little too long.

"I don't know what I'll do when she moves on," he says one day when he catches Mitchell smiling privately to himself after Annie leaves the room.

"It's best not to think about it," Mitchell agrees.

_13._

What Nina hates, more than _anything_, is that the one time her impulse judgment turned out to be less-than-flawless, it led to _this_.

She's always been good at making quick decisions. It's why she was head sister back in Bristol. It's why she was so good at her job. She was always able to understand what needed to be done in the millisecond in which it needed to happen.

Grabbing Herrick from the hospital so that the police wouldn't take a picture of him _seemed _like a good idea at the time. And so had phoning in the tip about Mitchell.

It's only now, with her back pressed up against the counter and her eyes staring into the black and twisted soul of a man not quite human, that she realizes the foolishness of those two endeavors when you put them together. She snatches one former monster, seemingly reformed, into her life, and she ignores the dangers. She saves the vampire and werewolf and ghost world from being exposed because it's the right thing to do.

Then she reports her boyfriend's friend (no, _her friend_, sometimes, too, when she forgets what he is) to the police. A vampire. A vampire who can't show up on film. She risks the lives of she, her George, and her _child_ to prevent exposure, and then she goes and invites that exposure anyway by hurting the three people closest to her heart (and oh, _God_, will Annie _ever_ forgive her?) And this is how it ends. A knife to the gut because the one time her judgment was off, it did not lead to the death of a patient. It is going to lead to the destruction of mankind.

What she hates more than anything in the world is that the last thing she thinks before feeling the pain in her spine, is that _Mitchell was right about him._

_14.  
_

One day, the boys are both at work, and it's just Nina and Annie sitting across from one another at the kitchen table.

"So," Nina says suddenly, setting aside her mug of tea. "You and _Mitchell_."

"Yeah," Annie says with a bright smile, blushing. Nina honestly didn't know that ghosts _could _blush.

"You know he's old enough to be your grandfather's _father_, right?"

Annie thinks about it and says, "Yeah, I suppose."

"And, what, you don't find that creepy? Isn't it a bit pedo?"

"Not _really_. It's different, isn't it? I'm dead, after all, and he's a vampire, and we'll both be around forever. It's not like _human _life. And I know I'm still _technically _only about…gosh, I'd be twenty-five now. But I'll be twenty-two forever. That's different from if I was, you know, human."

"But what if he decides you're not…"

"Nina, please," Annie says quickly, quietly but urgently so Nina knows right away that she's crossed a line. "I've thought about it. I don't sleep, remember. I don't have a job. All I have is making mugs of tea and cleaning house and thinking about all of you and what my future's going to hold. And the telly, but then even during commercial breaks my mind starts to wander. I know it's strange, and of _course _I'm worried one day he'll realize he'd rather have some sexed up vampire than the ghost he can't even _shag _properly…"

"What? You can't _shag_?" Nina asks, aghast.

"I really shouldn't be talking about this. It's not…you know. It's private stuff."

"No, really, this is _Mitchell _we're talking about. _Mitchell, _with the tight pants and the fingerless gloves and the _hair_ and the _face_. If he can't shag _you_, with the legs and the eyes and the _body_, we're _definitely _talking about it."

Then she sees Annie's face, and she sees the way Annie's undaunting smile is starting to waver a bit as she stares down into the mug of tea that she can't drink, and Nina realizes that maybe the problem isn't _Mitchell_. Or at least, maybe Annie doesn't see it that way. Maybe Annie can't get those clothes off, or maybe Annie can't _feel_, or maybe there are a thousand other things about ghost biology that Nina doesn't know because it's not like any of this has been properly explained to her. Or maybe it really _is _Mitchell's fault, and Annie's just blaming herself because blaming herself is the kind of thing that Annie does.

"It's just hard for him," Annie says diplomatically. "Sex is a weapon to vampires. Something they use to get peoples' defenses down before, you know, the biting. Us, it's not like that. It's _pure_."

But Nina can see from the way her fingers play with the rim of the cup and the way her eyes blink back unshed tears that Annie's really wondering if Mitchell just said all that to cover up the fact that he can't feel her properly, or he doesn't find her attractive enough, or he's secretly exhausted from running around with some she-vamp with massive tits.

Nina's not really good at the heart-to-heart stuff, but she knows Annie's hurting, so she fumbles about in her brain for something to make her friend feel better. She eventually says, "if it'll make you feel better, I can tell you about the _really _embarrassing noise that George makes sometimes in the middle of sex."

"Oh my God, Nina!"

"Oh, come on. Now I've said it, you can't tell me you're not curious."

"A little. But you have to _promise_ we can't let either of them know we've talked about this."

"Why not? They'd probably just make a slightly sexist comment about girls and their feelings, Mitchell brooding in your general direction and George sounding as if he'd sucked down some helium. That's how they are."

"Yeah, but…George's _sex_ noise? I am very careful about where I wander during the night for a reason. I don't want him to know that I know..._that_."

_15._

When Annie drops and breaks a mug later that night and makes a noise of frustration that sounds a little _too _familiar to be coincidence, (and has Nina spitting out her coffee and George looking up with horror) Nina realizes that she and Annie are sort of like _proper_ best girl friends. And when Nina offers to help clean up with a secret smile and a light punch on the arm, Annie realizes the same.

"I still don't understand what just happened," Mitchell says as George sputters indignantly at Nina and Annie reclines on the couch to rest her head primly in Mitchell's lap.

"I don't know _what _Nina's on about," Annie says innocently, and this time Nina doesn't even bother to hide her laughter.


End file.
